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I were but out of this frightful house!"-"I wish you were," said Robert, simply; "for I fear there are more plots hatching against you than you are aware of: is not Mrs Boothby's Sukey to sleep to-night in the room with your ladyship?"-"I consented, on Mrs Boothby's importunity, that she should."-" Why then," continued he, "I saw Jem carry a cast gown of Mrs Boothby's, she had formerly given to Sukey, but which she asked back from the girl on pretence of taking a pattern from it, into his master's dressing-room; and when I asked him what he was doing with it there, he winked thus, and said, it was for somebody to masquerade in to-night."—" Gracious God!" cried Lucy," whither shall I turn me?-Robert, if ever thou would'st find grace with Heaven, pity a wretch that knows not where to look for protection!"-She had thrown herself on her knees before him." What can I do for your ladyship?" said he, raising her from the ground. Take me from this dreadful place," she exclaimed, holding by the sleeve of his coat, as if she feared his leaving her." Alas!" answered Robert, "I cannot take you from it."-She stood for some moments wrapt in thought, the fellow looking piteously in her face." It will do!" she cried, breaking from him, and running into her dressing-closet.-"Look, Robert, look here; could I not get from this window on the garden-wall, and so leap down into the outer court?" -"But supposing your ladyship might, what would you do then?"-" Could not you procure me a horse ?-Stay-there is one of the chaise-horses at grass in the paddock-do you know the road to Mrs Wistanly's?"-" Mrs Wistanly's!"-" For heaven's sake, refuse not my request; you cannot be so cruel as to refuse it.""I would do much to serve your ladyship; but if they should discover us- ""Talk not of ifs, my dear Robert ;-but soft-I will manage it thus-no, that can't be either-the servants are in bed by eleven."-" Before it, an't please your ladyship."-" If you could contrive to have that horse saddled at the gate so soon as all is quiet within, I can get out and meet you.""I don't know what to say to it." -Somebody from below cried, Robert-Lucy was down on her knees again." Stay, I conjure you, and answer me."-" For God's sake

her escape; but the consciousness of her purpose stopped her tongue when she would have uttered some pretence for talking with him. At times her resolution was staggered by the thoughts of the perils attending her flight; but her imagination presently suggested the danger of her stay, and the dread of the greater evil became a fortitude against the less. The hour of eleven at last arrived. Mrs Boothby, whose attendance was afterwards to be supplied by that of her maid, had just bid her good-night, on her pretending an unusual drowsiness, and promised to send up Sukey in a very little after. Lucy went into her dressing-closet, and, fastening the door, got up on a chair at the window, which she had taken care to leave open some time before, and stepped out on the wall of the garden, which was broad enough a-top to admit of her walking along it. When she got as far as the gate, she saw, by the light of the moon, Robert standing at the place of appointment: he caught her in his arms when she leaped down. "Why do you tremble so?" said she, her own lips quivering as she spoke. "Is the horse ready?"—"Here, answered Robert, stammering, "but—” “Get on," said Lucy," and let us away, for heaven's sake!"-He seemed scarce able to mount the horse; she sprung from the ground on the pad behind him. "Does your ladyship think," said Robert, faintly, as they left the gate, "of the danger you run?"-"There is no danger but within those hated walls."-" "Twill be a dreadful night;" for it began to rain, and the thunder rolled at a distance. "Fear not," said she, "we cannot miss our way."-" But if they should overtake us They shall not, they shall not overtake us!"-Robert answered with a deep sigh.-But they were now at some distance from the house, and striking out of the highway into a lane, from the end of which a short road lay over a common to the village in which Mrs Wistanly lived, they put on a very quick pace, and in a short time Lucy imagined herself pretty safe from pursuit.

" 66

CHAP. XVII.

accidents in his journey.

rise," said he," and do not debase yourself to Bolton sets out for Bilswood. A recital of some a poor servant, as I am."-" Never will I rise till you promise to meet me at eleven."—" I will, I will (and the tears gushed into his eyes,) whatever be the consequence." Sukey appear ed at the door, calling, Robert, again ;-he ran down stairs; Lucy followed him some steps insensibly, with her hands folded together in the attitude of supplication.

In the interval between this and the time of putting her scheme in execution, she suffered all that fear and suspense could inflict. She wished to see again the intended companion of

As I flatter myself that my readers feel some interest in the fate of Miss Sindall, I would not leave that part of my narration which regarded her, till I had brought it to the period of her escape. Having accompanied her thus far, I return to give some account of Mr Bolton.

According to the promise he had made to Lucy, he set out for Bilswood, on the second day after the date of that letter she received from him by the hands of his gardener. That

faithful fellow had orders to return, after delivering it, and on procuring what intelligence he could of the family, to wait his master, at a little inn, about five miles distant from Sir Thomas Sindall's. The first part of his business the reader has seen him accomplish; as to the rest, he was only able to learn something, confusedly, of the Baronet's attachment to Miss Lucy. He expected to have seen that young lady again on the day following that of their first interview; but her attention had been so much occupied by the discoveries related in the two last chapters, and contriving the means of avoiding the danger with which she was threatened, that her promise to the bearer of Mr Bolton's letter had escaped her memory. He set out, therefore, for the place of appointment on the evening of that day, and reached it but a very short time before his master arrived.

Bolton, having learned what particulars Jerry could inform him of, desired him to return in the morning to his work in Sir Thomas's garden, and remain there till he should receive farther orders; then, leaving his horses and servants for fear of discovery, he set out on foot, in the garb of a peasant, which Jerry had found means to procure him.

As he had passed several years of his life at Bilswood, he trusted implicitly to his own knowledge of the way; but soon after his leaving the inn the moon was totally darkened, and it rained with such violence, accompanied with incessant peals of thunder, that, in the confusion of the scene, he missed his path, and had wandered a great way over the adjacent common before he discovered his mistake. When he endeavoured to regain the road, he found himself entangled in a very thick brake of furze, which happened to lie on that side whence he had turned; and, after several fruitless efforts to make his way through it, he was obliged to desist from the attempt, and tread back the steps he had made, till he returned to the open part of the heath. Here he stood, uncertain what course to take; when he observed at a distance the twinkling of a light, which immediately determined him. On advancing somewhat nearer, he found a little winding track that seemed to point towards the place; and after following it some time, he could discern an object which he took for the house to which it led.

The lightning, which now flashed around him, discovered on each hand the earth raised into mounds that seemed graves of the dead, and here and there a bone lay mouldering on the walk he trod. A few paces farther, through a narrow Gothic door, gleamed a light, which faintly illuminated a length of vault within. To this Bolton approached, not without some degree of fear; when he perceived at the farther end a person, in a military uniform, sitting by a fire he had made of some withered brush wood piled up against the wall. As Harry ap

"who takes

proached him, the echo of the place doubled
the hollow sound of his feet." Who is there?”
cried the stranger, turning at the noise, and half
unsheathing a hanger which he wore at his side.
"A friend,” replied Harry, bowing,
the liberty of begging a seat by your fire.”—
"Your manner," said the other, "belies your
garb; but whoever you are, you are welcome
to what shelter this roof can afford, and what
warmth my fire can give. We are, for the time,
joint lords of the mansion, for my title is no
other than the inclemency of the night. It is
such a one as makes even this gloomy shelter
enviable; and that broken piece of mattock, and
this flint, are precious, because they lighted some
bits of dry straw, to kindle the flame that warms
us. By the moss-grown altar, and the frequent
figures of the cross, I suppose these are the re-
mains of some chapel devoted to ancient vene-
ration. Sit down on this stone, if you please,
sir, and our offering shall be a thankful heart
over some humble fare which my knapsack con-
As he spoke, he pulled out a loaf of
tains."
coarse bread, a piece of cheese, and a bottle of
ale. Bolton expressed his thanks for the in-
"I fear,
vitation, and partook of the repast.
sir," said his companion, "you will sup poorly;
but I have known what it is to want even a
crust of bread.—You look at me with surprise;
but, though I am poor, I am honest."—" Par-
don me," answered Harry, "I entertain no sus-
picion; there is something that speaks for you
in this bosom, and answers for your worth. It
may be in my power to prevent, for the future,
those hardships, which, I fear, you have former-
ly endured." The soldier held forth the bit of
bread which he was putting to his mouth. "He,
to whom this fare is luxury, can scarcely be de-
pendent; yet my gratitude to you, sir, is equally
due;-if I have felt misfortune, I have deserved
it."-He sighed, and Harry answered him with
a

sigh." I see a sort of question in your face, sir; and I know not why it is, there are some faces I cannot easily resist. If my story outlasts the storm, it will take from the irksomeness of its duration."

CHAP. XVIII.

The Stranger relates the History of his Life.

"It is now upwards of twenty years since I left my native country. You are too young, sir, to have gained much knowledge of mankind; let me warn you, from sad experience, to beware of those passions which at your age I was unable to resist, and which, in the commerce of the world, will find abundant occasion to overcome incautious and inexperienced youth. Start not when I tell you, that you see before you one, whom the laws of his country had doomed to expiate his crimes by death, though, from the

mercy of his prince, that judgment was mitigated into a term of transportation, some time ago elapsed. This punishment I incurred from the commission of a robbery, to which some particular circumstances, joined to the poverty consequent on dissipation and extravagance, had tempted me.

"The master to whom my service was adjudged in the West Indies, happened to die soon after my arrival there. I got my freedom, therefore, though it was but to change it for a service as severe as my former: I was enlisted in a regiment then stationed in the island, and, being considered as a felon, unworthy of any mild treatment, was constantly exposed to every hardship which the strictest duty, or the most continual exposure to the dangers of the climate, could inflict. Had I revealed my story, and taken advantage of that distinction which my birth and education would have made between the other convicts and me, it is probable might have prevented most of the evils both of my former and present situation; but I set out, from the first, with a fixed determination, of suffering every part of my punishment, which the law allots to the meanest and most unfriended. All the severities, therefore, which were now imposed upon me, I bore without repining; and, from an excellent natural constitution, was not only able to overcome them, but they served to render me still more patient of fatigue, and less susceptible of impression from the vicissitudes of the weather; and from a sullen disregard of life, with which the remembrance of better days inspired me, my soul became as fearless as my body robust. These qualities made me be taken notice of by some of the officers in the regiment, and afterwards, when it was ordered to America, and went on some Indian expeditions, were still more serviceable, and more attractive of observation. By these means I began to obliterate the disgrace which my situation at enlisting had fixed upon me; and, if still regarded as a ruffian, I was at least acknowledged to be a useful one. Not long after, on occasion of a piece of service I performed for an officer on an advanced guard, that was attacked by a party of hostile Indians, I was promoted to a halberd. The stigma, how ever, of my transportation was not yet entirely forgotten, and by some it was the better remembered, because of my present advancement. One of those, with whom I had never been on good terms, was particularly offended at being commanded, as he termed it, by a jail-bird; and one day, when I was on guard, had drawn on the back of my coat, the picture of a gallows, on which was hung a figure in caricature, with the initials of my name written over it. This was an affront too gross to be tamely put up with; having sought out the man, who did not deny the charge, I challenged him to give me sa

tisfaction by fighting me. But this, from the opi-
nion conceived of my strength and ferocity, he
did not chuse to accept ; on which I gave him so
severe a drubbing, that he was unable to mount
guard in his turn, and the surgeon reported that
his life was in danger. For this offence I was
tried by a court-martial, and sentenced to re-
ceive five hundred lashes as a punishment.
When their sentence was communicated to me,
I petitioned that it might be changed into death;
but my request was refused. That very day,
therefore, I received one hundred lashes, (for the
sentence was to be executed at different periods,)
and next morning was to suffer as many more.
The remainder, however, I resolved, if possible,
to escape by an act of suicide. This I was only
prevented from putting in execution by the
want of opportunity; as I had been stripped of
every the smallest weapon of offence, and was
bound with ropes to one of the posts of my bed.
I contrived, nevertheless, about midnight, to
reach the fire-place with my feet, and having
drawn out thence a live ember, disposed it im-
mediately under the most combustible part of
the bed. It had very soon the effect I desired;
the room was set on fire, and I regained my
liberty, by the ropes, with which I was tied,
being burnt. At that moment the desire of life
was rekindled by the possibility of escaping;
the flames bursting out fiercely at one side of
the house where I lay, the attention of the sol-
diers, whom the fire had awaked, was princi-
pally turned to that quarter, and I had an op-
portunity of stealing off unperceived at the op-
posite side. We were then in a sort of wooden
huts which had been built for our accommoda-
tion on the outside of one of our frontier forts;
so that, when I had run two or three hundred
yards, I found myself in the shelter of a wood,
pretty secure from pursuit ; but, as there it was
impossible for me long to subsist, and I had no
chance of escaping detection if I ventured to
approach the habitations of any of my country-
men, I had formed the resolution of endeavour-
ing to join the Indians, whose scouting parties
I had frequently seen at a small distance from
our out-posts. I held therefore in a direction
which I judged the most probable for falling in
with them, and a very little after day-break dis-
covered a party, seated after the manner of their
country, in a ring, with the ashes of their newly-
extinguished fire in the middle. I advanced
slowly to the place, which I had almost reached
before I was perceived. When they discovered
'me, they leaped up on their feet, and, seizing
their arms, screamed out the war-whoop, toalarm
the different small parties who had passed the
night in resting-places near them. One of them,
presenting his piece, took aim at me ; but I fell
on my knees, shewed them my defenceless state,
and held out my hands, as if imploring their
mercy and protection. Upon this, one of the

oldest among them made a sign to the rest, and advancing towards me, asked me in broken French, mixed with his own language, of which too I understood something, what was my intention, and whence I came? I answered as distinctly as I could to these interrogatories; and shewing the sores on my back, which I gave him to understand had been inflicted at the fort, made protestations, both by imperfect language and significant gestures, of my friendship to his countrymen, and hatred to my own. After holding a moment's conversation with the rest, he took my hand, and, leading me a little forward, placed me in the midst of the party. Some of them examined me attentively, and, upon some farther discourse together, brought the baggage, with which two prisoners, lately made from some adverse tribe, had been loaded, and laid it upon me. This burden, which to any man would have been oppressively heavy, you may believe, was much more intolerable to me, whose flesh was yet raw from the lashes I had received; but as I knew that fortitude was an indispensable virtue with the Indians, I bore it without wincing, and we proceeded on the route which the party I had joined were destined to pursue. During the course of our first day's march, they often looked stedfastly in my face, to discover if I shewed any signs of uneasiness. When they saw that I did not, they lightened my load by degrees, and at last, the senior chief, who had first taken notice of me, freed me from it altogether, and, at the same time, chewing some herbs he found in the wood, applied them to my sores, which in a few days were almost entirely healed. I was then entrusted with a tomahawk, and shortly after with a gun, to the dexterous use of both which weapons I was frequently exercised by the young men of our party, during the remainder of our expedition. It lasted some months, in which time I had also become tolerably acquainted with their language. At the end of this excursion, in which they warred on some other Indian nations, they returned to their own country, and were received with all the barbarous demonstrations of joy peculiar to that people. In a day or two after their arrival, their prisoners were brought forth into a large plain, where the kindred of those who had been slain by the nations to which the captives belonged, assembled to see them. Each singled out his expiatory prisoner, and, having taken him home to his hut, such as chose that kind of satisfaction adopted them in place of the relations they had lost; with the rest they returned to their former place of meeting, and began to celebrate the festival of their revenge. You can hardly conceive a species of inventive cruelty, which they did not inflict on the wretches whom fortune had thus put into their power; during the course of which, not a groan escaped from the sufferers; but while the use of their voices re

mained, they sung in their rude, yet forcible manner, the glory of their former victories, and the pleasure they had received from the death of their foes; concluding always with the hopes of revenge from the surviving warriors of their nation. Nor was it only for the pleasure of the reflection that they caroled thus the triumphs of the past; for I could observe, that, when at any time the rage of their tormentors seemed to subside, they poured forth those boastful strains in order to rekindle their fury, that intenseness of pain might not be wanting in the trial of their fortitude. I perceived the old man whom I have before mentioned, keep his eye fixed upon me during the solemnity; and frequently, when an extreme degree of torture was borne with that calmness which I have described, he would point, with an expressive look, to him on whom it was inflicted, as if he had desired me to take particular notice of his resolution. I did not then fully comprehend the meaning of this; but I afterwards understood it to have been a preparatory hint of what I myself was to endure; for the next morning, after the last surviving prisoner had expired, I was seized by three or four Indians, who stripped me of what little clothes I had then left, tied me in a horizontal posture between the branches of two large trees they had fixed in the ground, and, after the whole tribe had danced round me to the music of a barbarous howl, they began to re-act upon me nearly the same scene they had been engaged in the day before. After each of a certain select number had stuck his knife into my body, though they carefully avoided any mortal wound, they rubbed it over, bleeding as it was, with gun-powder, the salts of which gave me the most exquisite pain. Nor did the ingenuity of these practised tormentors stop here; they afterwards laid quantities of dry gun-powder on different parts of my body, and set fire to them, by which I was burnt in some places to the bone.-But I see you shudder at the horrid recital; suffice it then to say, that these, and some other such experiments of wanton cruelty, I bore with that patience, with which nothing but a life of hardship, and a certain obduracy of spirit, proceeding from a contempt of existence, could have endowed me.

"After this trial was over, I was loosed from my bonds, and set in the midst of a circle, who shouted the cry of victory; and my aged friend brought me a bowl of water, mixed with some spirits, to drink. He took me then home to his hut, and laid applications of different simples to my mangled body. When I was so well recovered as to be able to walk abroad, he called together certain elders of his tribe, and acknowledging me for his son, gave me a name, and fastened round my neck a belt of wampum. 'It is thus,' said he, that the valiant are tried, and thus are they rewarded; for how shouldst

thou be as one of us, if thy soul were as the soul of little men? He only is worthy to lift the hatchet with the Cherokees, to whom shame is more intolerable than the stab of the knife, or the burning of the fire.'

CHAP. XIX.

A continuation of the Stranger's Story.

"In this society I lived till about a year and a half ago; and it may seem extraordinary to declare, yet it is certainly true, that, during the life of the old man who had adopted me, even had there been no legal restraint on my return to my native country, scarce any inducement could have tempted me to leave the nation to which he belonged, except perhaps the desire of revisiting a parent, and a sister, whom I had left in England sunk beneath that ignominy, which the son and the brother had drawn on his guiltless connections. When we consider the perfect freedom subsisting in this rude and simple state of society, where rule is only acknowledged for the purpose of immediate utility to those who obey, and ceases whenever that purpose of subordination is accomplished; where greatness cannot use oppression, nor wealth excite envy; where the desires are native to the heart, and the languor of satiety is unknown; where, if there is no refined sensation of delight, there is also no ideal source of calamity; we shall the less wonder at the inhabitants feeling no regret for the want of those delicate pleasures of which a more polished people is possessed. Certain it is, that I am far from being a single instance of one, who had even attained maturity in Europe, and yet found his mind so accommodated, by the habit of a few years, to Indian manners, as to leave that country with regret. The death of my parent by adoption loosened, indeed, my attachment to it; that event happened a short time before my departure from America.

"The composure with which the old man met his dissolution, would have done honour to the firmest philosopher of antiquity. When he found himself near his end, he called me to him, to deliver some final instructions respecting my carriage to his countrymen; he observed, at the close of his discourse, that I retained so much of the European, as to shed some tears while he delivered it. In those tears,' said he, "there is no wisdom, for there is no use; I have heard that, in your country, men prepare for death, by thinking on it while they live; this also is folly, because it loses the good, by anticipating the evil: we do otherwise, my son, as our fathers have better instructed us, and take from the evil by reflecting on the good. I have lived a thousand moons, without captivity, and without disgrace; in my youth

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I did not fly in battle, and in age, the tribes listened while I spake. If I live in another land after death, I shall remember these things with pleasure; if the present is our only life, to have done thus is to have used it well. You have sometimes told me of your countrymen's account of a land of souls; but you were a young man when you came among us, and the cunning among them may have deceived you; for the children of the French king call themselves after the same God that the English do; yet their discourses concerning him cannot be true, because they are opposite one to another. Each says, that God shall burn the others with fire; which could not happen if both were his children. Besides, neither of them act as the sons of Truth, but as the sons of Deceit; they say their God heareth all things, yet do they break the promises which they have called upon him to hear; but we know that the spirit within us listeneth, and what we have said in its hearing, that we do. If in another country the soul liveth, this witness shall live with it; whom it hath here reproached, it shall there disquiet ; whom it hath here honoured, it shall there reward. Live, therefore, my son, as your father hath lived; and die as he dieth, fearless of death.'

"With such sentiments the old man resigned his breath; and I blushed for the life of Christians, while I heard them.

"I was now become an independent member of the community; and my behaviour had been such, that I succeeded to the condition of my father, with the respect of a people amongst whom honour is attainable only by merit. But his death had dissolved that tie which gratitude, and indeed affection for the old man, had on my heart; and the scene of his death naturally awakened in me the remembrance of a father in England, whose age might now be helpless, and call for the aid of a long-lost son to solace and support it. This idea, once roused, became every day more powerful, and at last I resolved to communicate it to the tribe, and tell them my purpose of returning home.

"They heard me without surprise or emotion; as indeed it is their great characteristic not to be easily awakened to either. You return,' said one of the elders, to a people who sell affection to their brethren for money; take therefore with you some of the commodities which their traders value. Strength, agility, and fortitude, are sufficient to us; but with them they are of little use; and he who possesses wealth having no need of virtue, among the wealthy it will not be found. The last your father taught you, and amongst us you have practised; the first he had not to leave, nor have we to bestow; but take as many beaverskins as you can carry on your journey, that it may reach that parent whom, you tell us, you go to cherish.'

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